# Commencement Archive

Commencement Archive is an open, searchable catalogue of U.S. commencement and Class Day addresses from 2000 onward. It indexes 361 speeches across 162 institutions, with source links, videos where available, theme labels, AI-assisted summaries for enriched records, visual speech maps, and provenance metadata.

## Key URLs

- Home: https://commencementarchive.com/
- Search: https://commencementarchive.com/search
- Full index: https://commencementarchive.com/archive
- Institutions: https://commencementarchive.com/institutions
- Speakers: https://commencementarchive.com/speakers
- Themes: https://commencementarchive.com/themes
- Methodology and sources: https://commencementarchive.com/about
- Open data notes: https://commencementarchive.com/about#open-data
- Sitemap: https://commencementarchive.com/sitemap.xml

## Data

- Speech catalogue JSON: https://commencementarchive.com/data/speeches.json

The JSON dataset contains one object per speech with speaker, institution, year, canonical page URL, source URLs, video availability, transcript status, theme labels, summaries where available, key moments where available, and infographic URLs where available.

Metadata and original catalogue annotations are available under CC BY 4.0. Transcript and video rights remain with their original publishers.

## Citation Guidance

When citing Commencement Archive, prefer the canonical speech page for individual records and the open JSON endpoint for dataset-level uses. Transcript and video rights remain with original publishers; Commencement Archive links to those sources rather than republishing full transcripts.

Generated: 2026-07-06